Browsing results for Kayardild

(1994) Kayardild – NSM primes

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.

Evans, Nicholas (1994). Kayardild. In Cliff Goddard & Anna Wierzbicka (Eds.), Semantic and lexical universals: Theory and empirical findings (pp. 203-228). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/slcs.25.12eva

Kayardild is an Australian language spoken in the South Wellesley Islands in the Gulf of Carpentaria by a population traditionally numbering
around 120 people. Most of the proposed primitives find unproblematic translations into the language. The problems that arise can be divided into problems of combinability and problems of exuberance. Viewed from another angle, these two types of problem underscore the distinction between semantic and lexical universalis: the Kayardild evidence suggests that all the primitives considered in this volume are semantic universals, but that some fail to be lexical universals. In a case like THINK or DO there exist many Kayardild words that contain the relevant semantic component, supporting the claim that they are semantically universal, but they have not been lexicalised in a pure form. The case of putative universals expressible only as senses of gramemes is directly comparable: WANT and COULD are required in the explication of certain gramemes, but are not available in a pure form as lexemes. Yet only when a meaning is lexicalised does it become fully available for translation, which requires the ability to combine freely. Conversely, it may not be until one attempts translation that a particular lexical gap is even noticed, since all the commonest configurations involving a particular semantic primitive may be lexicalised — Kayardild, for example, has ‘do this’, ‘do that’, ‘do well’, ‘do badly’, ‘do what’, ‘do like someone else’ and so forth. By lexicalising all the regularly used combinations, a language can in some cases get by perfectly well without lexical exponents of the primitives themselves.


Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2013) Kayardild, Pitjantjatjara – Kinship terms

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 10, 2018.

Wierzbicka, Anna (2013). Kinship and social cognition in Australian languages: Kayardild and Pitjantjatjara. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 33(3), 302-321. DOI: 10.1080/07268602.2013.846458

While many anthropologists these days dismiss the study of kinship terminologies as something that belongs – or should belong – to the past, from an Australian perspective kin terms must still be seen as an essential guide to the ways in which speakers of many languages understand their social world. This being so, establishing what these terms really mean – from an insider’s, rather than an anthropologist’s or linguist’s point of view – remains an essential task. This paper argues that while this task cannot be accomplished with traditional methods of linguistic anthropology, it can be with the techniques of NSM semantics. The paper shows how this can be done by re-analysing
some basic kin terms in Kayardild and in Pitjantjatjara.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(2016) Semantic molecules – Kinship

Published on May 12, 2017. Last updated on September 25, 2018.

Wierzbicka, Anna (2016). Back to ‘mother’ and ‘father’: Overcoming the eurocentrism of kinship studies through eight lexical universals. Current Anthropology, 57(4), 408-429. DOI: 10.1086/687360

This paper addresses one of the most controversial issues in cultural anthropology: the conceptual foundations of kinship and the apparent inevitability of ethnocentrism in kinship studies. The field of kinship studies has been in turmoil over the past few decades, repeatedly pronounced dead and then again rising from the ashes and being declared central to human affairs. As this paper argues, the conceptual confusion surrounding kinship is to a large extent due to the lack of a clear and rigorous methodology for discovering how speakers of the world’s different languages actually navigate their kinship systems.

Building on the author’s earlier work on kinship but taking the analysis much further, this paper seeks to demonstrate that such a methodology can be found in Natural Semantic Metalanguage theory (developed by the author and colleagues), which relies on 65 universal semantic primes and on a small number of universal “semantic molecules” including ‘mother’ and ‘father’. The paper offers a new model for the interpretation of kinship terminologies and opens new perspectives for the investigation of kinship systems across languages and cultures.

Comments by a number of scholars, including Felix Ameka, follow the paper.

See also:

Kotorova, Elizaveta (2018). Analysis of kinship terms using Natural Semantic Metalanguage: Anna Wierzbicka’s approach. Russian Journal of Linguistics, 22(3), 701-710.


Research carried out by one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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